8 Cleaning Mistakes You Might Be Making

The Ask a House Cleaner Show and Podcast with Angela Brown

Cleaning mistakes you might be making while doing household chores. These top 8 cleaning mistakes are common family and homeowner goofs. Today we Ask a House Cleaner professional household tips and tutorials on how to avoid cleaning mistakes. Angela Brown, The House Cleaning Guru says anyone can be a savvy cleaner with a little cleaning advice. Today's sponsor is https://HouseCleaning360.com HC360 is a referral database of the best in home service providers

Cleaning mistakes you might be making while doing household chores. These top 8 cleaning mistakes are common family and homeowner goofs.

Today we Ask a House Cleaner professional household tips and tutorials on how to avoid cleaning mistakes.

Angela Brown, The House Cleaning Guru says anyone can be a savvy cleaner with a little cleaning advice.

Today’s sponsor is https://HouseCleaning360.com

HC360 is a referral database of the best in home service providers

Listen: 8 Cleaning Mistakes You Might Be Making

Watch: 8 Cleaning Mistakes You Might Be Making

Hey there, I’m Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer.

Question: 8 Cleaning Mistakes You Might Be Making

Cleaning mistakes. Are you making cleaning mistakes? You might be. You might be a professional house cleaner. Or you might be a do-it-yourselfer. We all make cleaning mistakes sometimes. But if you know what they are, maybe you won’t make them. We’re going to talk about that today.

Now today’s question comes from a homeowner. She’s afraid she might be making some cleaning mistakes.

She has a family, but the family’s not really involved in the household chores. And when she does the chores, she says, “I am not a trained professional. I have no idea what it is I’m supposed to be doing when I clean my house. Maybe I’m making some cleaning mistakes. Do you have any tips?”

Yeah, I do. I have a couple of tips. Here are a couple cleaning mistakes that people make.

Cleaning Mistakes: Not Getting Your Family Involved

The family should take part in the chores. Because if you let the chores pile and build up, it becomes overwhelming for one person to try to do.

Everybody should learn how to make their beds and clean up after themselves. They should pick up their clothes, toys, and shoes.

Everyone should wipe down the bathroom counter after they’ve brushed their teeth and shaved.

They should all should learn how to take their dishes to the kitchen sink. And maybe rinse them off and put them in the dish drainer, or put them in the dishwasher.

Not getting the family involved is cleaning mistake number one.

Cleaning Mistakes: Letting the Chores Pile Up

Now we just mentioned this. But what happens when you take your dishes to the kitchen sink and you just set them inside the sink? The food does not evaporate; the water evaporates from the food and the food sticks to the dishes.

If you had rinsed off immediately, it would have been easy. Now it becomes difficult. You have to get a sponge and soap and put elbow grease into to get the dried on food off.

If you’ll just rinse it off as you go, boom, it’s done. That’s easy.

Cleaning Mistakes: Cleaning Already Clean Surfaces

What? Who cleans too hard?

It’s amazing because people want to do right by their families. They like to have clean, sanitary environments. So people will clean a cupboard, for example, and they just keep cleaning it. When it’s clean, it’s clean.

A cleaning mistake you might be making is you are overcleaning. Or you vacuum the floor and you just keep vacuuming. When you’re done, you’re done. There’s only so much you can do.

It’s like water boiling. When you boil water for a longer period of time, it doesn’t boil the water anymore. The temperature has already risen. There’s already steam. It’s already bubbling. That’s it. You don’t need to keep boiling it. It doesn’t boil the water anymore.

It’s the same with cleaning. You don’t keep cleaning something that’s already clean.

Cleaning Mistakes: I Clean Too Hard

So for example, scrubbing stains out of carpets. You see a stain, maybe it’s coffee, maybe it’s red wine, and you have a tendency you want to scrub it out.

The more you scrub, the more it will get clean, right? No, not at all. What happens is you ruin the fibers in the carpet by scrubbing too hard.

The first thing you want to do if you have a stain on your carpet is to get a white towel and blot. You can use a white paper towel. But you just want to blot. You can use your knuckles as pressure to blot to get the dampness out. This is going to get some of the colors.

You want to avoid paper towels that have prints on them. Because if you blot that with a wet stain, the dye from the paper towels will bleed into your carpet. And now it’s worse than just the stain because now you have a multicolored stain on your carpet.

You want to use either a white rag or a white paper towel to blot the stains out. Blot it out to the point where it’s almost too dry, then you can go ahead and treat it with some kind of a carpet stain remover.

Depending on what is inside the carpet will determine what kind of stain remover you use. I have one that is my favorite. It is linked to the show notes so that you can see which one I use.

I will recommend that you blot, not scrub. That is a cleaning mistake that you can’t get away from.

Cleaning Mistakes: Not Cleaning The Floor Around the Toilet

Another cleaning mistake that people make is next to the toilet. The toilet has lots of germs already. When some people clean the toilets, they do not clean around the edge and the boil of the toilet.

If you have gentlemen in the house, this should affect how you clean the toilet. Sometimes there’s stuff back there behind the toilet that gets missed. We might clean the bowl of the toilet and inside, but we might miss the floor around it. That’s another cleaning mistake.

Cleaning Mistakes: Not Cleaning Items Next to the Toilet

Speaking of the toilet, next to the toilet a lot of times there will be things. It might be a basket of things, of books, of personal items. It might be wipes, feminine hygiene products or whatever. There are all these weird little items that people keep next to and around their toilet.

The overhead fan collects dust, and when you turn it on, the dust falls on these things.

These items will also pick up overspray from the splashing in the toilet. Then it gets stuck on those things and those things are not clean either.

This is another cleaning mistake, skipping cleaning the items around the toilet.

Cleaning Mistakes: Now Airing Out The Toilet Brush

Let’s continue talking about the toilet. Another common mistake concerns the toilet brush. A lot of people will use the toilet brush to clean the toilet and then they put it back in the holder while it’s wet.

You must let that air out and sanitize. Because it’s clean water but you don’t want to create bacteria in that toilet brush holder. You want to prop it up against the toilet and close the toilet seat on it. Do this so that it can air and dry out before you put it back in the holder.

Cleaning Mistakes: Not Cleaning The Toilet Plunger

A lot of people will have a plunger next to their toilet. They might use the plunger too, you know, flush the toilet, and they don’t rinse the plunger off.

I don’t know why, but it is a common mistake. Next to the toilet, there’s usually a bathtub or a shower or something like that. You need to take your plunger and rinse it off after using. Then it becomes clean and ready to use again.

There was a situation where a repairman used my toilet and ended up using the plunger. He did not rinse out the plunger after, and it had poop inside of it. Then he put it back on the floor behind the toilet.

Every time we would come into this bathroom, it smelled like poop, and we’re like, “What is going on? Why does this bathroom smell like poop?”

We cleaned the toilet. And it wasn’t until we cleaned the plunger that we found this rotting poop inside it. It was so gross. You have to clean the plunger after you use it. That’s another cleaning mistake.

So That’s a Few!

So that’s just a few common cleaning mistakes. There are a few more, and we may do another session on cleaning mistakes at another time. Those are just a few that will get you started.

Anyway, I hope you do not make cleaning mistakes. Because these are all manageable things that you can fix.

Until we meet again, leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.

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